The latest financing will help the company build a machine with double the number of qubits

The chip pictured above powers D-Wave's 2000Q quantum computer. The company is working on a more powerful chip for its next-generation computer.
Photo:
D-Wave Systems Inc.

D-Wave Systems Inc. has received $30 million in investor funding to build a new quantum computer, one that executives say could eventually prevent traffic jams and connect patients with appropriate, individualized cancer therapies in seconds.

The funding comes from Canada’s Public Sector Pension Investment Board, which plans to invest an additional $20 million by mid-2018 after certain revenue and technology-based milestones are achieved, D-Wave said. Total investor funding to date for the quantum computing company is now $180 million.

“This (financing) sets us up to deploy the next-generation of our technology, which will be more powerful,” said Dan Cohrs, chief financial officer for D-Wave.

While traditional computers use binary digits, or bits, which can either be 0s or 1s, quantum computers use quantum binary digits, or qubits, which represent and store information in both 0s and 1s simultaneously. This means the computers have the potential to sort through a vast number of possibilities within a fraction of a second to come up with a probable solution.

The building block of each $15 million D-Wave quantum computer is a superconducting qubit that contains a metal called niobium, D-Wave President Bo Ewald said. When the niobium and qubits are arranged in a particular way and cooled to temperatures 180 times colder than outer-space, the metal helps enable quantum mechanical effects. Those effects include superposition, which is when the 0s and 1s exist simultaneously, and entanglement, when qubits share the same properties with each other regardless of the distance between them.

The number of qubits created by companies to date has remained relatively small, meaning experiments are currently limited to a narrow swath of information.

Mr. Ewald said the latest financing will help the company build a quantum computer over the next two or three years that could contain between 4,000 and 5,000 qubits, up from its most advanced 2,000-qubit model, which means it could investigate larger problems with many more variables.

Volkswagen AG recently performed a traffic optimization experiment using D-Wave’s 1,000-qubit model. Working on a $15-million D-Wave quantum computer over the cloud, a team of five in-house data scientists took GPS data from 10,000 taxis in Beijing and simulated specific routes that would allow each car to travel from downtown Beijing to the nearest airport, about 20 miles away, in the fastest time possible without creating a traffic jam.

A more powerful quantum computer, integrated with probabilistic machine learning capabilities, could help predict the exact time that a traffic jam might occur and send different routes to drivers via mobile apps in real-time, Mr. Ewald said.

The machine learning models could also help match a patient to an individualized cancer therapy in a few seconds or minutes, a task that requires a massive amount of computation that is currently impractical for traditional computers, said Dr. Cohrs.

Part of the new financing will also go toward building software tools to help people use the quantum computer more easily, Mr. Ewald said.

“On traditional computers, there are programming languages like C++ and Java that people use, but none of those exist yet for quantum computers,” Mr. Ewald said.